Just Ahead

One of a retailer’s best customers is seated at her computer monitor—but she’s working, not shopping. That is, until a small window opens in the lower right corner of her screen to let her know that her favorite apparel brand has added new products. And it’s not just a text message. With one click of the mouse, the window maximizes on her screen to deliver a multimedia fashion show.

But the shopper isn’t seeing video of models on the runway. Instead, her screen serves up a richer product view with special effects she can manipulate with instant results, faster than what she’d see on the retailer’s e-commerce site; for instance, fading one color view of a product into another color simply by nudging her mouse, or “floating” the image of a jacket across the window to match up with another image of a blouse. She clicks on a skirt and brings up a box with a product image, product details and a mini-clipboard where she makes a note to herself— “for Susan’s wedding” —and drags it all to a “save-it” area for future consideration.

Later, she’s looking online to complete the rest of her outfit. But she doesn’t have to loop back to multiple sites to revisit what initially captured her attention. Instead, as she shopped she dragged and dropped the items that interested her into the same “save-it” area—a concept one web design firm dubs the “uberbucket” —which goes with her wherever she goes online. When she’s ready to buy, she highlights selected items in the bucket. With one checkout consisting of a click or two, she completes payment and shipping arrangements at all of the retailers.

Later still, she decides to buy a handbag she had started to order, but abandoned. She never did log on at that retailer, instead shopping the site anonymously. But she doesn’t have to re-create her order or any information about it when she goes back to the site and clicks to call about the bag. Instead, the agent on the phone at the other end immediately greets her by name, with information about her uncompleted order and the product. The agent offers a hat that complements the handbag—just the sort of style the shopper likes, and within the price range she is most likely to be willing to pay.

It’s coming

It all sounds very futuristic, but that shopping scenario, or some version of it, may be coming very soon to a computer monitor near you. In fact, parts of it already have arrived as e-commerce technology developers roll out new releases and tests.

At a conceptual level, the new shopping applications are all rooted in the unmet needs and implementation barriers merchants wrestle with as they seek to better leverage the opportunity of the Internet. So the new applications and those under development blast through the infrastructure constraints of browsers, for example, to serve up a richer visual experience through the desktop. They free shoppers to tote images and product information with them as they travel the web. They segment personalized offers more finely and with speedier automation of that process.

Some of the most interesting new applications are still just in the realm of “why not.” For instance, Bridget Fahrland, executive creative director at Fry Inc., identifies one huge need driving development in e-commerce technology as the need for greater expediency. So she visualizes a future shopping application in which shoppers could text to buy from a web site. “Why not be on a site and be able to text to buy from the site with your cell phone? It would be so much easier,” she says.

Such an application might allow a customer to choose a product, color and size from a web site page, and all of that information could generate a specific text identifier number, she adds. “Your cell phone already has information about who you are and where you live built in, so you can save the step of entering all that. You’d just have to enter your credit card information,” she says.

Fry also is intrigued with the concept it tags the “uberbucket” for its go-anywhere utility to online shoppers. Fahrland says such an application might look like a kind of mini-browser within a browser, into which shoppers could drag products, pictures and other online content. The application could call back to any store to check on inventory status, but interact with a master checkout and transaction processor so as to allow shoppers to check out centrally instead of at each retailer site. “Since 1994, we have been filling out billing and shipping pages on different sites again and again,” Fahrland says. “We’re ready for a change.”

Plenty of room for improvement

Looking out across the e-commerce landscape, technology developers see plenty of opportunities to improve online shopping for both merchants and shoppers, and in such ideas are the seeds of future commercially-available applications. At licensed software and on-demand e-commerce technology provider Art Technology Group Inc., vice president of product strategy Barry Coleman says retailer customers are asking about how to incorporate user-generated content not just into the online buying process, which already happens in the form of customer reviews, but into the merchandising process itself. Toward that end, ATG is exploring several development possibilities including one that would let users create and display their own favorite product catalogs on a site.

“They could annotate them and they’d drive cross-sells and upsells,” Coleman says. “On something like MySpace, people say what products they like and what they like about them. Why not let people have this conversation on the retailer’s site rather than having it somewhere else?”

While Fahrland’s and Coleman’s ideas are concepts—at least for now—other seemingly futuristic online shopping applications are in the testing stage. One common thread among many applications now being tested is the desire to sidestep the limits of web page infrastructure: issues such as file size, page weights and page loading times. Instead, these applications would reside on consumers’ desktops rather than depending on a live Internet connection to serve content from the retailer.

Women’s apparel retailer Anthropologie is testing the Allurent Desktop Connection, which vendor Allurent Inc. says is the first retail desktop application to use Adobe Integrated Runtime technology. The application creates a direct link between the retailer and the customer, cutting search engines, other online ads, and other browser-related distractions out of the connection.

Consumers would download the application from the retailer’s site onto their desktop, which provides a connection to Anthropologie that the desktop user can engage at will. The application pops up a window on users’ screens when they turn on the computer. Consumers can click then to maximize the window and see the content being served, or they can launch the window later by clicking on its dedicated desktop icon.

The application collects updated content from the retailer’s server when new content becomes available, via the Internet connection it maintains on the back end. But because the application, when launched by the consumer, serves the Flash-based content from what it’s already stored on the user’s desktop, the content comes up faster than would be the case if the content was served using a real-time Internet connection. That opens the door to the use of rich media too cumbersome to serve on web pages, and in fact, Allurent describes the Adobe Integrated Runtime-powered content served by the desktop application as “cinema-like.”

Floating

Images in the application “glide,” says Graeme Grant, Allurent’s chief operating officer. “Even the items in search-by-color glide into different positions based on moving to another color. Things just seem to float into prominence,” he said.

IRCE 2008 Conference Multi-Media CD-ROM

Michael Robinson, general manager of Anthopologie, says the application will be offered for download to Anthropologie’s most loyal customers next year. “That is who is going to be most likely to want to give us real estate on their desktop,” he says. Beyond the fact that it provides the direct connection to customers that Anthropologie wants, the richer visual imagery the application supports is a fit for a brand identity Robinson describes as “tactile, experiential and appealing to all the senses.” To gauge success, he’ll look initially at metrics such as customer response and feedback.

Web design firm Blast Radius Inc. specializes in keeping its eye on the customer experience, and it sees stock advertising messages pushed out to customers becoming less and less effective. “What will matter in the future is brand, and the way brand will matter is if people have a superior experience with it,” says Darrell Snow, vice president of technology and chief architect.

So Blast Radius is working on retailer implementations with a company called ShopInPage.com, whose technology projects a catalog browsing experience through search ads. When shoppers click on a search ad that uses ShopInPage technology, they download a Flash file to be played on a Flash player, an application that already exists on most desktops. It’s faster than going to the e-commerce site to see content. “This is one example we are seeing in which the advertising model is becoming more interactive and a better brand experience,” Snow says.

A second trend Snow notices is a build on how personalization technology customizes search on sites. While some providers of such technologies customize offers according to profiles based on customers’ purchase history and other data, including algorithms, Snow says the next iteration of profiling technology adds business rules to the mix and better automates site search results. That will allow a retailer to automatically generate offers to populate search results based not only on customer profiles, but also on the fact that the retailer may have 7,000 pairs of Wrangler jeans it needs to move.

A view that merges the customer’s behavior, the customer’s profile, and the retailer’s business allows online merchants to be more successful because it “hyperpersonalizes” what’s offered to shoppers, Snow says. Currently, Blast Radius is working with ATG on developing such implementation at retailers.

The one-to-one ideal

Technology vendor MyBuys Inc. also is working on driving better recommendations for shoppers at retail sites—and in the e-mails and RSS feeds retailers send to customers. MyBuys 3.0, released this summer, is a one-to-one behavioral targeting service that builds profiles based on transaction history, observed behaviors and stated consumer preferences. A testing and optimization component further refines the presentation of offers to customers, and the technology is capable of delivering those recommendation across all three channels.

MyBuys’ product recommendations to shoppers become even more on-target as those customer profiles expand. “As retained customer profiles become even deeper and more detailed, we enable retailers to establish an ongoing one-to-one relationship throughout the customer lifecycle,” says Paul Rosenblum, vice president of marketing. Karmaloop, an urban online clothing retailer, has experienced a 220% increase in revenue per customer interaction since implementing the MyBuys service to deliver personalized recommendations while customers shop on its web site as well as in follow-up messages in e-mail and RSS feeds, according to Anand Shah, chief of operations, Karmaloop.

What customers see on a web site isn’t the only area targeted by e-commerce technology developers for improvement—what happens behind the scenes can help move the needle on online sales as well. ATG is working to solve one such back-end issue for online retailers in a product it rolled out this summer and continues to develop.

“Many of ATG’s retail customers have expressed a need to be able to serve customers mid-transaction in a more seamless way regardless of whether they are registered on the site or anonymous,” says ATG’s Coleman. “If they have a web site and a call center, how do they transfer people from the site to the call center, even though they are anonymous, so agents know what promotion the shopper has been given and don’t have to create the shopper’s cart?”

ATG is beginning to address that question as it folds functionality from click-to-call and click-to-chat technology company eStara Inc., which it acquired last year, into the Commerce Service Center product it released this summer. That product makes information available mid-order to call center agents even when the customer hasn’t registered on site to make the purchase.

Redefining online success

It does that by giving the agent visibility into a database that’s captured whatever order information has been entered by the shopper on the retailer’s site. The eStara technology finds the caller’s order information in the database by means of an identifying code assigned to the order information as soon as it was entered by the shopper, even though the information is not yet attached to a customer’s name. By clicking to call, the customer sends a message that pulls up the right order information, by code, on the responding agent’s screen.

The eStara technology automating that process is gradually being added to the Commerce Service Center product already in use at ATG retailer clients. Promotions, session history and order content will be visible to the agent so the customer who calls doesn’t have to recreate his shopping cart to share with the agent. And that, ATG believes, could boost sales by reducing shopping cart abandonment in such scenarios, perhaps by as much as 25% to 35%, according to Coleman.

The importance of providing a good shopping experience and supporting that with the best possible customer service is nothing new to retailers. But the online channel already has changed what defines success in those areas, and advancing e-commerce technology promises to do more of the same. Whether it’s technology that provides shoppers with a richer interaction at the front end, or gives site operators a more seamless operational execution on the back end, the options for online retailers will continue to expand, leaving retailers with more to ponder and select from in deciding how to best represent their brand.

“That is the focus for us,” says Robinson. “As new technology comes along, we ask, is there something we can do to give the customer a better experience?”

mary@verticalwebmedia.com

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